#940 What Should One Say to Darwin about Animal Suffering?
May 18, 2025Dear Dr. Craig,
Thank you for your consideration.
If you could have met with Darwin, how would you have dialogued with him on this particular topic and helped him resolve the tension he expressed? (See below.)
I have watched many of your debates, and in fact know that you’ve answered similar questions on this topic before. However, I feel this nuanced version may be worth answering. My question and the dilemma Darwin faced seem more related to the problem of suffering than of evil, though I realize they are often conflated as well as in some sense related.
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin, like many philosophers, naturalists, and theologians of his time, was deeply disturbed by the apparent cruelty observed within nature—particularly the behavior of ichneumonid wasps, whose larvae feed inside living caterpillars. He saw this as difficult to reconcile with the idea of a benevolent, purposeful Creator. This kind of natural suffering contributed to his growing doubts about the existence and nature of God. In a letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote:
“I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
“Letter 2814 — Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa, 22 May [1860]"
David
Dr. craig’s response
A
I address this problem, David, in the projected third volume of my Systematic Philosophical Theology. I draw upon that here.
The problem of animal suffering is especially acute for young Earth creationists, who believe that every single organism was designed by God just as we find it. The evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, himself a confessing Christian, mercilessly pummels the creationist for thinking that God specifically and intentionally designed all the horrors of nature. Ayala believes that evolution permits us to avoid attributing the cruelties of nature to God’s design. Such, in Ayala’s opinion, is Darwin’s gift to religion.[1] Ayala appeals to the creativity and excitement of an evolutionary view of life to justify God’s permitting evolution.
The awe and wonder of biological evolution cannot, however, mask the tremendous cost at which it seems to be bought. Suffering is not just an accompaniment of biological evolution; it is essential to it as animals compete for limited resources. Why think that a world that unfolds like that is better than the world of the young Earth creationist?
There can be good reasons for God’s using a long evolutionary process to create human beings. For example, the fossil fuels that have made modern civilization possible are the residue of vast primeval forests that flourished for eons in the past. A viable ecosystem would include animals that were part of that system. Certainly an omnipotent God could create the Earth ex nihilo with all its coal and oil fields in situ. But all things being equal, a world with a genuine past seems preferable to a magically produced Omphalos world with the mere appearance of age. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the heart of the problem of natural evil is not biological evolution per se but animal predation and natural disasters, for even if animals did not evolve from one another, so long as the animal kingdom is characterized by predation and disasters, the problem of animal suffering remains.
A moment’s reflection, however, also reveals that animals are part of an ecosystem which must be balanced if it is to continue. It is no accident that every ecosystem has predators. To illustrate, Canadian authorities have found it necessary to reintroduce wolves into the wild for the sake of the caribou herds because in the absence of these predators to pick off the sick and the aging, the caribou became overpopulated, resulting in overgrazing and starvation of the caribou themselves. Paradoxically, the caribou actually need wolves in order to flourish.
The nineteenth century geologist William Buckland’s remarks on the advantages of animal predation merit serious reflection:
The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfill with joy the functions for which they were created.[2]
To Buckland’s sensible remarks, Richard Dawkins can only sneer, “Well, isn’t that nice for them!” Surprisingly, yes, as the example of the caribou illustrates, it is nice for them! Most animals live basically happy lives that end suddenly. In a world without predators, insects would take over, and animals would slowly die off as the vegetation is depleted. Once the insects consumed all the vegetation, they would die off as well. Even in a purely vegetarian world there is no guarantee that there would be any less suffering than in this one. For there is no guarantee that in the vegetarian world animals would not savagely kill one another out of sport or in competition for the dwindling supply of vegetation.
Philosopher William Hasker therefore espouses what he calls a “natural order theodicy” for animal suffering. Hasker rightly points out that a world operating according to natural laws is necessary in order for rational behavior, indeed, survival itself, to be possible and that the cost of such a world includes animal suffering. Still, can something more be said to ameliorate animal suffering so as to justify Hasker’s assertion, “The natural order theodicy contends that the price was worth paying”?[3]
Here recent studies in biology have provided surprising, new insights into this old problem that can be of help by reducing the cost at which an evolutionary past exhibiting animal predation and suffering is purchased. In his book Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, Michael Murray takes cognisance of these developments.[4] Murray distinguishes three ascending levels in a pain hierarchy:
Level III: a second-order awareness that one is oneself experiencing (II)
Level II: a first order, subjective experience of pain
Level I: information-bearing neural states produced by noxious stimuli, resulting in aversive behavior
Spiders and insects experience (I). These would include Darwin’s aforementioned caterpillars. But there is no reason to attribute (II) to such creatures. It is plausible that they are not sentient beings at all, having a subjective, interior life of some sort.[5] Yet the vast majority of Ayala’s grotesqueries of nature involve insect behavior. Sentient experience plausibly does not arise until one gets to the level of vertebrates in the animal kingdom.[6] But even though animals like dogs, cats, and mice experience pain, nevertheless the evidence is that they do not experience level (III), the awareness that they are themselves in pain. For the awareness that one is oneself in pain requires self-awareness, which is missing in all animals except perhaps for the humanoid primates.[7] Ayala himself asserts that “humans are the only animals with self-awareness.”[8] Thus, remarkably, even though animals may experience pain, they are not aware of being themselves in pain.
God in his mercy has apparently spared animals the awareness of being themselves in pain. Thus, their suffering is of a wholly different character than ours. Animal suffering can be horrifying and agonizing to witness. But Murray points out that we humans have an inveterate tendency toward anthropopathism, that is, projecting human states of mind onto animals and even inanimate objects. We talk to our house plants, our cars, our computers. This makes the problem of animal suffering indistinguishable from that of human suffering, when in fact they are importantly different. When Ayala speaks of nature’s “cruelties,” he is guilty of the fallacy of anthropopathism. Ayala is, perhaps, aware of this because he subtly qualifies his claim about nature’s being cruel by saying, for example, “the mating interactions . . . in some insects. . . would be judged cruel and even sadistic by human standards.”[9] But, of course, it is precisely the point that it is fallacious to judge insect behavior by human standards.[10] This is anthropopathism at its worst. A proper understanding of animal pain can help to justify Hasker’s claim that the evolutionary process was worth the price.
Of course, the question still remains, why did God create a world featuring an evolutionary prelude to man? I suspect that the answer will have to do with God’s ultimate purposes for human beings. It is plausible that God wanted to create an ecosystem where autonomous human agents can flourish and choose without coercion to embrace or reject God’s offer of saving grace. The natural world is the arena in which the drama of human salvation is played out.
[1] Francisco Ayala, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007).
[2] Cited by Richard Dawkins from S. J. Gould, “Nonmoral nature,” in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983) in Greatest Show on Earth, p. 396.
[3] William Hasker, God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. C. Meister and J. Dew, Jr. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2017), p. 69.
[4] Michael J. Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[5] On the purely mechanical actions of the amazing sphex wasp see J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: SCM Press, 2009), p. 74.
[6] On the state of current research see the Jonathan Birch, “The search for invertebrate consciousness,” Noûs 56 (2022):133-53. Birch points out that learned avoidance behaviors are found in animals as simple as the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, with only 302 neurons, and even in the spinal cords of rats that have been disconnected from the brain!
[7] For a helpful review of animal self-consciousness see Jonathan Birch, Alexandra K. Schnell, and Nicola S. Clayton, “Dimensions of Animal Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24/10 (October, 2020).
[8] Francisco J. Ayala, “Evolution Beyond Biology: Comments and Responses,” Theology and Science 7/4 (2009): 389; cf. p. 385.
[9] Ayala, Darwin’s Gift, p. 23.
[10] As Ayala recognizes, “physical or biological . . . events that cause harm are not moral evil actions, because they are . . . the result of natural processes. . . . in the world of nature, physical and biological . . . , no morality is involved” (Ayala, “Evolution Beyond Biology,” p. 384).
- William Lane Craig